In Rachel Cantor’s second novel, Good on Paper, protagonist Shira Greene jokes with the neighborhood panhandler: “ ‘Can I offer you some change?’ I asked. … ‘No, thanks,’ he said, ‘I’m fine the way I am.’ ” Instead, she hands him a bear claw.

This same question — care for a little change? — trails Shira through the course of the novel. Her answer, however, is murkier.

Yes, Shira needs a shake-up. Her early promise as a writer has dwindled while she drifted from temp job to temp job, her few published stories and essays nearly forgotten. Her 7-year-old daughter, Andi, is clever and precocious (sometimes unbelievably so), but not always at the top of Shira’s mind.Her dear friend Ahmad acts as co-parent to Andi, provides the Manhattan apartment they all share and forms the bulk of Shira’s social life.

Shira’s ownmother disappeared when she was a girl. Her father’s no longer living. She married, then divorced, and Andi’s father remains anonymous halfway across the world.

Such stagnation and loss provide rich ground for change, but Shira has no faith in true reform. “Metamorphosis was overrated, I thought. Look at me: forty-four, and the thought of my mother turned me into a weeping seven-year-old. [Shira’s age when her mother left the family.] We don’t change. We never change. If some deus ex machina turned me into a tree, I’d still be a tree on the verge of being a seven-year-old.”

Right on time, Shira’s deus ex machina materializes, delivered, oddly, as a telegraph sent by Nobel Prize-winning (fictional) poet Romei, who hopes Shira will translate his version of Dante’s La Vita Nuova (The New Life), which Shira herself translated as a grad student. Both Dante’s and Romei’s La Vita Nuova blend poetry and prose in a declaration of love (to Dante’s Beatrice and Romei’s wife, respectively); both works also trace the writers’ searches for a new aesthetic.

With this invitation, Shira now has a place in the world! Or a road to get her there, or so she posits. She imagines Dante, icon of the Western canon, with Romei’s postmodern flag flying from an Italian cap, and Shira hanging on by a footnote. “I would be amazing,” she thinks, “the envy of grad students everywhere!”

Shira quits her temp job, and awaits the first installment of Romei’s work, which arrives by fax (Y2K is just around the corner). Shira sets to work making notes, building a lexicon and returning to the transformative work she once loved and later grew to doubt.

New pages arrive in batches, and the arrangement becomes more mysterious as Shira scrutinizes the text, uncovering allusions to her own publications as well as tricks of language impossible to translate. She becomes increasingly unsure of Romei’s intentions and begins to wonder if Romei has set her up for failure.

As Shira’s fixation grows, the project infiltrates other parts of her life, straining the family dynamic and sparking encounters that disrupt her earlier complacency. Shira rekindles a friendship with kindred mind Benny, a laid-back, scholarly rabbi who owns People of the Book, an eclectic shop littered with Persian cats, unpacked boxes and green-haired shop girls. Benny helps Shira uncover what Romei is truly writing, why he writes and what role Shira is meant to play.

To say much else about the course of events would spoil the satisfaction in Cantor’s elaborately spun novel, which thrives on wordplay and intertextual echoes. There are no fewer than four stories running and merging through the novel, each nudging and pulling at the others, a feat that makes Good on Paper an engrossing read and an invigorating subject of study.

Ultimately, this is a story about stories, about the power of art to redeem both creator and viewer. The stories Shira confronts — and those she tells about herself — wield incredible influence. They return her to questions she’s abandoned but needs to ask again: What does it mean to love? How can we possibly forgive?

What she finds in Romei’s work is “good on paper” but runs far deeper, and what she says of Dante holds true for herself (and all of us): “He needs the dynamism of narrative, which alone promises new life.”

Cecily Sailer is a freelance writer living in Austin and manager for creative-writing and literary programs at the Austin Public Library Friends Foundation.